"I am myself deeply convinced that imagination is the basis of a sound reason. It is by dint of feeling, and of putting ourselves in fancy into the place of other men, that we can learn how we ought to treat them, and be moved to treat them as we ought. Man, to express the thing in familiar language, is a complex being, made up of a head and a heart. So far as we are employed in heaping up facts and in reasoning upon them merely, we are a species of machine; it is our impulses and our sentiments, that are the glory of our nature."
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Historians from EnglandAtheists from EnglandNovelists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandAnarchists
Original Language: English
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"Of Religion" (1818), quoted in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, Volume 7: Religious Writings, ed. Mark Philp (2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Godwin
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William Godwin
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher, educationalist, novelist, historian and biographer. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism. He was the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley and father-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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